The 10 Top Big Data Startups Of 2018 (So Far)
Demand for big data technologies is expected to generate $210 billion in revenue by 2020 and that industry growth is spurring a steady stream of startups developing innovative big data products.
Customer Data Analytics Drives The Big Data Industry
Spending on big data and business analytics technologies is expected to maintain the rapid growth of the past few years, expanding at a CAGR of 11.9 percent to $210 billion in 2020 from $150.8 billion in 2017, according to market researcher IDC.
An increasing portion of big data spending is for cloud-based subscriptions for big data systems and applications, according to Forrester Research, more than seven times the growth of on-premises system sales.
A review of big data startups indicates that businesses' need to analyze customer data from multiple, disparate sources to understand their behavior and improve the customer experience is a major driver in big data system deployments.
And a growing number are bringing artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities to big data analytics.
See the latest entry: The 10 Hottest Big Data Startups of 2022
Here are CRN's picks for the top big data startups so far in 2018.
(For more on the biggest news of 2018, check out "CRN's Tech Midyear In Review." and see “The Top Big Data Startups In 2019 (So Far)” for the latest information on big data startups.
Arundo Analytics
CEO: Tor Jakob Ramsoy
Arundo develops machine-learning software and advanced analytical applications for managing and optimizing the performance of asset-intensive industrial operations. The company's cloud-based, edge-enabled technology is a player in the growing market for Internet of Things analytics.
Founded in 2015, Arundo is based in Houston with offices in Palo Alto, Calif., and Oslo, Norway. In January the company raised $25 million in Series A funding, bringing its total financing to $32.5 million.
Civis Analytics
CEO: Dan Wagner
Civis Analytics develops data science software that businesses and organizations use to improve how they identify and engage with their customers. The cloud-based Civis Platform, which includes data science tools and a predictive dataset, helps companies develop smarter strategies and make better decisions.
Founded in 2013 and based in Chicago, Civis Analytics works with consulting service companies and is now developing a more comprehensive channel strategy.
The company's investors include Verizon Ventures, Drive Capital and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. The company lists Airbnb, Verizon and the American Red Cross among its early customers.
Cooladata
President: Guy Greenberg
As businesses become increasingly digital, capturing and analyzing customer behavior data are key to eveloping successful sales and marketing strategies, improving a company's products and services, and spurring revenue growth.
Cooladata, founded in 2012 in Israel and launched in the U.S. in 2017, has developed a next-generation behavioral analytics platform that pulls customer data from a wide range of sources for analysis – everything from websites, online advertisements, in-store systems, mobile applications, CRM and marketing systems, social media sites and more.
Cooladata says its system, with its data unification, analysis and sharing capabilities, makes it possible for businesses to answer questions like "What marketing channels provide the highest ROI?" and "What do customers who upgrade have in common?"
Dremio
CEO: Tomer Shiran
Dremio develops a self-service data platform that makes it easier for users to access data scattered across disparate sources, providing a SQL interface between popular business intelligence tools like Tableau, QlikView and Looker, and the ever-proliferating number of relational databases, NoSQL databases and data lakes.
Founded in 2015 and based in Mountain View, Calif., Dremio exited stealth in 2017. The company raised $25 million in Series B funding in January.
In April the startup debuted Dremio 2.0 with enhancements to its core Data Reflections technology that's based on the open-source Apache Arrow cross-language development software for columnar in-memory data.
Immuta
CEO: Matthew Carroll
Immuta markets a data management platform specifically for artificial intelligence tasks, allowing data scientists, data owners and governance teams to work together on big data projects.
Under the slogan of "accelerating the algorithm-driven enterprise," Immuta's software makes data "discoverable" without the need to physically move or copy it. That allows data scientists to quickly access data for machine-learning tasks and developing analytical models, and data governance professionals for constructing and enforcing complex data policies.
In March Immuta launched its inaugural channel program, seeking reseller, professional service, IT infrastructure and technology partners to help the company expand beyond its early adopter customers.
In June Immuta, founded in 2014 and based in College Park, Md., closed on $20 million in Series B financing.
Kyligence
CEO: Luke Han
Kyligence provides Kyligence Enterprise, a unified analytics platform that the company says simplifies big data analytics for business users, analysts and engineers. The system is based on Apache Kylin, the open-source OLAP engine that was developed for interactive analytics for petabyte-scale data stored in Hadoop systems.
Kyligence was founded in 2016 by the team that created Apache Kylin and Kyligence is a primary contributor to the Kylin project. The company, with offices in San Jose, Calif., and Shanghai, released a cloud version of its software in March.
Medallia
CEO: Borge Hald
Businesses today can find themselves with literally too much information about their customers, flooded with data from websites, social media, customer interactions and other sources, with no good way to turn that data into actionable insight.
Medallia develops the Medallia Experience Cloud platform that collects customer experience and feedback data from multiple sources, analyzes it, and through a series of performance management applications uses the results to resolve tactical issues and guide strategic decisions.
Based in San Mateo, Calif., Medallia has raised $255 million in four rounds of financing.
The company works with a range of consulting and services partners, including Accenture and PwC; implementation partners such as CommonFont and SMT; and technology partners including Tableau, Qlik and Google. In May the company launched the Medallia for Digital Partner Program for digital and analytics agencies.
Outlier.ai
CEO: Sean Byrnes
Outlier.ai develops artificial intelligence-based analysis software that collects business data from business applications like Adobe, Zendesk and MailChimp and analytical systems such as Amazon Redshift and Google Analytics, and sifts through it to identify insight from the unexpected changes and data outliers.
Oakland-based Outlier.ai was founded in 2015.
Stratifyd
CEO: Derek Wang
Straifyd offers an artificial intelligence-powered analytics platform that's able to select structured and unstructured data from any source, combine the data and analyze it in real time. The company particularly targets its software for analyzing customer interactions and conducting ad hoc analysis around customer 360 (acquisition and retention) initiatives.
Customers include Prudential, Masco, Etsy, and a number of Fortune 100 companies in the financial service, pharmaceutical and technology industries.
Founded in 2015, Stratifyd tripled its revenue in 2017 and nearly doubled its customer base and its employee roster. In March the company moved to a new location in Charlotte, N.C., to accommodate its rapid growth.
Unravel Data
CEO: Kunal Agarwal
Big data systems often have many moving parts. Unravel Data offers application performance management tools used to collect and analyze performance data from big data applications and infrastructure, using the results to troubleshoot and optimize the performance of big data systems.
Founded in 2013 and based in Menlo Park, Calif., Unravel Data raised $15 million in Series B funding in January.
Unravel Data works with platform vendors such as Cloudera and Microsoft Azure, consulting partners including Capgemini and HCL, and technology partners like Arcadia Data and Qubole.